


stars hide your fires

by brucewaynery



Series: happy steve bingo fills [13]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Fluff, Happy Steve Bingo, Light Angst, M/M, Star Gazing, Steve Rogers-centric, through out the years of steve rogers life except told by various wishes on stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21632020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brucewaynery/pseuds/brucewaynery
Summary: "What do you wish for?" Steve asks, looking up at the sky."Anything you want."or, Steve Rogers' life as told through various wishes he makes.(space, happy steve bingo)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: happy steve bingo fills [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1495793
Comments: 5
Kudos: 120
Collections: Happy Steve Bingo 2019





	stars hide your fires

Steve’s ten, and he’s known Bucky for a week.

They’re on his balcony at night, his first sleepover.

“The stars mean you can make a wish,” Bucky says, pointing up.

“What do you wish for?”

Bucky grins. “Can’t tell you, or it won’t come true.”

It sounds logical to Steve, so he looks up and wishes that he and Bucky are friends forever, he wishes that all the things wring with him go away so he can play with the rest of the kids at recess and for the first time in his life, he really appreciates the stars. He makes his wishes and tells Bucky that the stars are pretty, and he, in turn, tells him about all the constellations he read about in his Pa’s book.

They carry on talking until they fall asleep, leaning on each other, warm in the summer eve.

-

Steve’s sixteen, halfway to handing Charon his silver coin, and staring out the window next to his bed. He hates the hospital with a passion, he’s spent far too much of his life stuck in here while his mother works just to keep him alive, and, not for the first time, he considers just giving up entirely, what’s the point, afterall, in a guy who has to fight all his life just to stay alive. According to the doctors, he’ll probably be dead by 25 anyway, 30, if he’s lucky, and he doesn’t want the next decade of his, and his Ma’s life to be spent just barely living. 

He wishes to the stars dotted across the clear, dark skies that he has a quick and painless death, and for it to come fast, he wishes for his Ma and Bucky’s happiness - Lord knows he can’t give it himself. 

He wishes and wishes and wishes and when he wakes up he knows for certain that God doesn’t exist. If He did, would He make Steve suffer so? Would He make his Ma suffer because of him? If he asked his Ma, she would tell him the story of Job once more, and tell him to have faith, and that’s how he knows that his Ma is so, so much better than him - she doesn’t give up, even when he’s been on his death bed so many times Hell is probably sick of it too (there’s no denying, no matter what Ma and Bucky say, he caused the people he loved to suffer, he’s going to Hell.).

He wakes up to the sun in his face and his Ma smiling down at him, relieved.

-

He’s eighteen and drunk, lying on top of his apartment building. He wants to see the stars, but the skies are cloudy, he wants to drink more, but the bottle’s empty and Bucky refuses to get more (it’s not like the stores are going to be open this late anyway). 

He wants his Ma back.

The God he was taught about wouldn’t let a person like Sarah Rogers predecease someone like him, if He really existed, and everything still went the way it did, Steve thinks he would deck him again and again until all his bones were broken, and God would probably just laugh.

He imagines it, staring blankly up at starless, cloud-covered skies, speaking aloud, wishing for things that won’t come true.

He does the same the next day, and the next, until the week blurs together into one hazy mess of drinking and grey skies and tears

It’s a week after and he’s on the roof again, halfway through the bottle, when the sky starts crying with him. It’s devastating, loud, crashing against Steve and the cars below and the metal of the hang-overs of the stores, and Steve knows that he should go inside, lest he catches his death, but he can’t bring himself to, and just stays there, for hours probably, until the storm clears, and he’s probably sick, but finally, finally, he can see the stars, bright and glittering against the midnight blue sky.

He doesn’t wish for the impossible again.

_I wish Ma rests well, God, if that’s the only thing you’ll ever do for me, let her rest well, please._

-

He’s twenty-one and they’ve declared war, and Steve can’t do anything about it, because he’s too damn weak, useless to even fight for his country. Those nights he wishes to the stars that he could do something, anything.

-

He’s twenty-five when a wish finally comes true, in the worst way possible.

They tell him that he’s doing something for his country, but he’s not. They’re using him as a performer, not a soldier.

He spends the nights wishing he could do more, be more, be _enough_.

And it’s not wishing that gets him away from it, it’s him actually doing something, it’s him who changes it, says ‘fuck you’ to General Phillips in the nicest way possible that doesn’t get him a dishonourable discharge.

He creates a team, a group. He gets to be so much more than he ever wished for.

They sit together in the firelight, making lewd images out of the stars, laughing and joking despite the horrors of the day, telling stories. They sleep next to the dying embers, under the stars, and for the first time, Steve Rogers isn’t unbearably lonely, nor is he a detriment to his peers, for the first time he _thanks_ the stars (he’s given up on God entirely., but the stars are a nice replacement.)

-

He’s twenty-seven when he wishes again.

He’s in a blown-apart pub in Europe, wishing he could get drunk, wishing he was better, faster, smarter. Wishing and wishing and wishing until he’s so damn angry and sad he may as well be drunk.

He’s twenty-seven when he crashes the Valkyrie and dies, in the Arctic’s ‘summer’, when it’s months and months until the pole will see the stars.

-

He’s still twenty-seven, but it’s seventy years later, and aliens fall from the sky.

He’s twenty-seven (and also ninety-seven) when he thinks he sees his first falling star. Not a star, really, but a man in a metal suit. As he falls, he wishes that he lives. 

It’s the first wish of this century that comes true.

Once again, he’s incredibly lonely. The team he’s been told to lead are fine, they’re ok, good people, strong people, but they’re not friends, Steve isn’t one of them, the way he was with the Howlies, Steve’s their CO, and they’re not in the trenches anymore, so there’s no real reason to make friends.

He spends a lot of time training, and at SHIELD, probably not enough sleeping, but he can’t-- he can’t wake up again and lose what little he has all over again. So he spends his nights stargazing.

The stars don’t change even though he can’t see many of them, the constellations he learned about so long ago, are still in the same place, though the man in the metal suit, Tony Stark, son of Howard, only in genes, really, and not much in anything else, tells him that they’re in a slightly different place, because of something called ‘red-shift’, but not enough to make it really significant.

“Unless you’re an astrophysicist,” Tony finishes, with a swig of his scotch, leaning over the railing parallel to Steve.

He’d pretty much ambushed Steve, he’d been on the roof, smoking, stargazing, when Tony had come up. He doesn’t hate it. 

“Just a soldier,” Steve replies, smiling slightly, and Tony finishes the glass and goes back in after patting Steve on the shoulder, and Steve smokes two more cigarettes before he too tries to sleep.

The next morning, Steve finds a book on constellations, their origins and meanings, on his nightstand.

-

He’s twenty-eight, but sometimes he’ll joke about being ninety-eight. 

Somehow, one of his favourite pastimes becomes stargazing with Tony. They’re equals now, not just him and Tony, but him and all the Avengers, and the new century isn’t as lonely as he once thought.

“Don’t you ever get bored?” Tony asks one night, looking up from his tablet.

“Of the stars?”

“They never change.”

Steve runs that over in his mind. He doesn’t go on the roof every day (turns out, sleeping is far more enjoyable when ice doesn’t flood one’s bones), and not for that long, but whenever he does, there’s half a chance that Tony might join him too, five minutes later with paperwork and two steaming mugs of coffee. A couple months ago, Tony put an actual table up here, and some chairs, he’d claimed that it was for himself, because his bones no longer enjoyed standing around in the cold, but Natasha had made a whip noise when Tony had mentioned it.

“They never change,” he parrots, as his answer. Tony harrumphs and glares at his tablet and Steve laughs, then laughs harder when Tony looks up to glare at _him_.

“What?” Steve says, still laughing, “You get tired of wishing?”

“You’re a five-year-old, Rogers,” Tony grumbles.

“Better than being fifty-five,” Steve quips, raising his eyebrows at Tony pointedly.

“Ohhhh FUCK you, Rogers, I’m younger than you!”

“You’re fifteen years older than me!”

Tony’s quiet for a second, processing that for the first time.

Finally, he says, “Nah.”

Steve looks at him in disbelief, “Nah?”

“Nah.”

Looking up at the sky, Steve wishes aloud, “I wish Tony believed he’s middle-aged.”

Tony grins at him, brighter than all the stars in the sky put together, “Won’t come true,” he says gleefully, “y’said it out loud.”

Steve, unable to think of anything better, grumbles back, “I’ll say you out loud,” which doesn’t have its intended effect at all.

“Oh yeah? You’ll be screaming my name huh?” Tony says, in that tone that makes Steve think, maybe he’s not just joking.

“You’d want that, wouldn’t you?” Steve says, matching his tone, teasing with an undercurrent of... something.

Tony just mutters something under his breath, which sounds suspiciously like “What am I gonna do with you, Rogers,” but Steve pretends that he has normal hearing and carries on with his drawing. The quiet isn’t lonely this time.

-

He’s thirty. Or a hundred.

He’s _lucky_.

He’s out of the city far enough that pollution doesn’t matter and he can see all the stars, properly and clearly and he makes a wish - something rare for him these days - and does something foolish.

And his best friend kisses him back.

-

Steve Rogers is thirty-one and, once again, halfway to handing Charon his silver coin, and there’s many things Tony’s willing to do for Steve, give him as many things as he wants, but this isn’t something he wants to fund, not if he can help it.

The doctors told him that he’s probably going to wake up, but not for at least a day, and he just has to go outside, the sight of Steve connected to so many tubes and machines, barely able to breathe on his own is too much for him. He stumbles out of the medbay to the elevator that’ll take him up to the roof.

He’s not a religious man, Howard had believed in science and science only, and his mom had told him that she’s been raised Catholic, and sometimes, in times of trouble, she’ll pray. He remembers seeing her clutching a cross pendant sometimes.

So he wishes on the stars instead, like Steve, regardless of how illogical wishing and praying are, fundamentally, but Steve had taught him that it meant hope, and by God, Tony could use all the hope and faith he could get. 

He doesn’t dare say his wishes aloud, lest they become untrue, but stares, unblinkingly, at the night sky until his eyes are burning and he’s run out of promises and wishes he can make

-

They’re on the roof again, under the stars, again, and Steve makes another wish. He doubts it’s his last one, but it’s the only one he knows with a minimum of a hundred percent certainty is entirely futile, because he knows the outcome, because he knows what will happen, he knows that he doesn’t need to ask the ineffable forces above for help, but he wants to, just in case.

Tony says yes before he even gets down on one knee.

-

They don’t get married under the stars, because that’s utterly absurd, and Tony refuses to be mugged on his wedding day, but they do dance, long after everyone’s left, in the starlight. The sky is clear and beautiful, but neither groom looks up, nor cares, nor dares to look away from his husband, they have all they could ever wish for, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and [reblogs](https://talesofsuspenses.tumblr.com/post/189411130941/stars-hide-your-fires) are greatly appreciated


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